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Description

Excerpt from First Lessons in Extemporizing on the Organ Experience teaches every church organist that the ability to extemporize even in modest fashion is t only a very convenient thing, but also, very often indeed, a positive necessity. Natural aptitude and intelligent practice are the foundations of good extemporizing, as indeed they are of good organ playing. Natural aptitude alone will t enable one either to play the organ well or to extemporize on it acceptably; one must practice extemporizing regularly, day by day, over and over again, just as one practices the pieces in one's organ repertoire. A seventeenth-century writer (Francis Quarles) puts it somewhat inelegantly, but squarely, when he writes: I see virtues where I smell sweat. To invent and play, on the spur of the moment and without specific preparation, an unwritten piece of music, long or short as the case may demand, conforming reasonably to the principles of musical composition, is to extemporize. Since improvisation is something that forms a part of the business of every organist, the present little book is extended as a helping hand. No attempt is made to teach more than can be taught, to do more than give the player a fair start, r to induct him into the mysteries of the whole-tone scale, the Wagnerian endless melody, or the modern dissonant style. The musical illustrations have been written to give the average organist with a fair amount of harmonic kwledge and rather more than a fair amount of musical intelligence, an idea of what is expected of him. These are first lessons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.